Comscore: There's an app for... everything (report)

Society is spending more time on the web than ever before. This is especially true for the smartphone crowd. New numbers from Comscore show that out of all of those folks accessing the web while mobile, virtually all of them are using apps and not a browser.

App usage is growing rapidly as smartphones are now in over half of phone owner hands in the U. S., according to Nielsen. The feature phone is headed for the relic bin as cheap smartphones intrude on the turf formerly reserved for the dumb phone.

The mobile web usage statistics from Comscore show that all of those smartphone users are in one app or another almost all the time. Apps are used to access the web a staggering 81.5 percent of the time spent online, leaving mobile browsers in the dust.

The app usage breakdown is telling, as Twitter users access the social network using apps and not the web a whopping 96.5 percent of the time. Facebook fares better on the browser, but still 80 percent of the time it is accessed with apps. That's slightly better than access to Google sites, as those are accessed 81.1 percent of the time through apps instead of a browser.

That last figure is surprising, as Google services are designed to be used in a browser. Google apps are not known for being very good compared to the browser, but the statistics show that doesn't matter to users.

The next time you are in public waiting for a table in a restaurant, look around and of all of the people you see tapping on a phone, you can make some assumptions. They are probably using an Android phone (with a 48 percent share), and they are almost certainly in one app or another. It seems there's an app for everything.